FILE -In this January 1948 file photo, Mahatma Gandhi rests his arms on shoulders of two disciples. A state in western India banned Pulitzer-Prize winning author Joseph Lelyveld's new book about Mahatma Gandhi on Wednesday, March 30, 2011, after reviews saying it hints that the father of India's independence had a homosexual relationship.

Great Soul

Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

By Joseph Lelyveld

In banning Joseph Lelyveld's new biography of Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian leader's native state of Gujarat has ensured a result - as so often happens in censorship cases - that it surely didn't intend: More people will want to read the book.

And they should.

On March 30, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules the state, made headlines by accusing Lelyveld of committing "the most reprehensible act by hurting the sentiments of millions of people" and demanded that he "tender a public apology." The provocation for this proscription was the mention in a recent review that Lelyveld had suggested that Gandhi, the father of the Indian nation, was bisexual and racist. The controversy has spread to the States: The nonprofit Foundation for Excellence, based in Santa Clara, last week canceled an event, scheduled for this Wednesday, that was to have been attended by Lelyveld.

It is surprising that the first public outcry in India against the review - the book has not yet been released in India - should come from the Hindu right, the political constituency of Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi on Jan. 30, 1948. This must join the many ironies Lelyveld's book brings out, including that of latter-day politicians in India (and South Africa) claiming to be his heirs and yet honoring his teachings, if at all, only in the most diluted versions. As Lelyveld writes in his author's note, "[I]t was hard to say what remained of him beyond his nimbus."

"Great Soul" cannot be described as a paean to Gandhi. It is a book that spans the more-than-half-century-long political career of a man who many across the globe and over time have adulated, followed, been inspired by, but also questioned, opposed and felt betrayed by.

Lelyveld, the former executive editor of the New York Times and a onetime India and South Africa correspondent for the paper, is not the first to dissect the myth that surrounds Gandhi, nor will he in all probability be the last. But Lelyveld brings his own scrutiny to bear on Gandhi in a readable narrative in which his own surprise and bemusement at Gandhi's inconsistencies, his political and social narrowness, and his occasional callous disregard of those who do not command his immediate political or personal interest are manifest.

Many aspects of Gandhi's life and ideas emerge here in damning light, but Lelyveld diligently illuminates their underlying context. This may be why he deals more gently, or perhaps more circumspectly, with some of Gandhi's striking ideological volte-faces, political retreats, social compromises and personal idiosyncrasies than many of his contemporaries, biographers and certainly his detractors have done.

The second half of Lelyveld's title is the clue to his book. It is an attempt to understand much more than Gandhi's careers either in South Africa or in India; it uncovers the bigger story of a man's efforts to impress a mahatma's values, derived from his experiences in both places, upon an India that does not always welcome them.

We are told in great detail about his 21 years in South Africa (1893-1914). We learn of his unifying the colony's Hindus and Muslims, his challenging on their behalf some of the racist laws of a white-ruled government, his tactical but unpopular retreats to retain firm control of his followers. He frequently angers his comrades by his unilateral decisions to compromise with the authorities when his narrowly conceived goals are achieved, leaving the many whom he has rallied and fired into action in the lurch.

We anguish over Gandhi's reluctance to take up arms on behalf of the poorest and most oppressed of his fellow subjects - the mostly lower-caste South Indian indentured laborers and the majority of Africans whose land it is. It is only after he witnesses the brutal wounds inflicted on Zulu bodies by the white government's merciless suppression of the Bhambhatha Rebellion of 1906 that Gandhi displays "horror" and "soul-searching over his unpopular decision to the side with the whites."

Without judgment on the meagerness of his sympathy, Lelyveld reproduces Gandhi's account that this is the "major turning point of his life spiritually" when his earlier vow of celibacy becomes linked as the prerequisite for "a life of service and voluntary poverty." And it was only in 1913, the year before his departure for India, that Gandhi was finally stirred into leading a satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) campaign in the indentured laborers' cause to abolish a 3-pound head tax they were required to pay at the end of their contract to remain in the colony or face expulsion.

Since Gandhi was incarcerated early in the campaign, it was the laborers from the mines and sugar plantations that went on strike and enacted his satyagraha campaign and so also bore the brunt of the reprisals for it. The wide condemnation of the violence unleashed on the striking laborers forced the white government to release Gandhi and make a settlement with him that only very partially met the demands made on behalf of the better-off Indians, canceled the head tax on former indentured laborers but gained nothing for those still under contract. Just as his dismay over the violence upon the rebellious Zulus had produced no long-lasting sympathy for them, the indentured laborers' resistance drew from him only his patronizing astonishment at their "unexpected powers of endurance and suffering."

This is a troubling account of Gandhi's time in South Africa. Unpalatable as they may be, these ingredients produced not only a mass leader but also a social reformer. South Africa is the nursery for Gandhi's widely admired ideals of social justice, his recognition of the perfect equality of all men, a vision of a freedom grounded in self-reliance - summed up pithily in his 1909 tract "Hind Swaraj" as the injunction to "cease to play the ruled" - and a devotion to public hygiene and sanitation that would drive him and his followers to perform the most reviled yet individually humble task of cleaning up feces.

He carries these principles and experiences to India, where his career until his murder mirrors curiously his earlier one in South Africa. At least this is the effect produced by his own frequent association of his actions in one place with those in the other. His surprising inability to forge a compact in India with Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the educated "untouchable" leader, despite their shared commitment to eradicating "untouchability," parallels his unfathomable reluctance to make an ally in South Africa of John Dube, a Zulu aristocrat and a "near neighbor," despite Gandhi's avowed, if belated, recognition of the Zulus' unjust subjugation.

Here were potential coalitions that could have changed the course of history for two extremely marginalized peoples. Gandhi missed both opportunities by refusing to cultivate either. Lelyveld scrupulously refrains from apportioning either blame or praise. This is true even of discussions of Gandhi's odder experiments, such as lying naked with women to check the steadfastness of his oath of celibacy.

However, there are times when Lelyveld's neutrality is bothersome, for instance when the "mahatma" summoned Manu, his 17-year-old grandniece, to his mattress in 1946. Some might see Gandhi's behavior as sexual and emotional abuse. Others might describe as perverse Gandhi's forcing a frightened Manu to walk alone through thick jungle in a recently riot-torn district merely to retrieve a pumice stone from where she had accidentally left it.

Rather than denounce, Lelyveld lays out the facts and leaves readers to summon up their own interpretations and reactions to them. In which case, perhaps he cannot be surprised if some readers infer a homosexual relation from his faithful presentation of the fragmentary evidence of Gandhi's correspondence with the architect Hermann Kallenbach.

In the end, it is not clear what Lelyveld's verdict is on Gandhi. In this he remains true to the fact that he never set out to provide one. We must satisfy ourselves with the plentiful story he tells about Gandhi through the painstaking record of his strivings, victories, as well as discrepancies, self-confessed flaws and failures, but we must also heed his important caveat: "To say that Gandhi wasn't absolutely consistent isn't to convict him of hypocrisy; it's to acknowledge that he was a political leader preoccupied with the task of building a nation, or sometimes just holding it together."

We might view the writing of this book as an act of salvation, for what person's legacy can ever fully bear the burden of the high honorific of a Great Soul without coming up short?